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Are there any plans to bring back Dolphin3.0 performance and get audio working again?

etking

New member
Unfortunately, the current 4.0 version of Dolphin runs much slower than the old 3.0 builds on any normal piece of hardware. Even if you spend thousands of dollars and heavily overclock your CPU, you will not be able to play games smoothly and with lag free audio anymore.

With the old 3.0-750 build however, everything, even games like Zelda SS run smoothly and fine using the old asynchronous HLE audio mode which got removed from dolphin recently.

Thus, since the Dolphin 4.0 release, people start complaining about performance and asking for old releases everywhere. This is because almost nobody in the the world can afford the hardware or has the overclocing skills required to run the new HLE audio engine introduced with 4.0 properly.

But it would be really easy to fix this by bringing back the old audio code from 3.0-750 as an option for the average normal player like me. Are there any plans to fix this or to create a "old HLE audio" fork of Dolphin so that mobile users and users with normal hardware can use Dolphin again which currently is completely broken because of the non working audio?

Dolphin should be aimed at the normal user again, because this is how it became famous and successful long ago. At the moment any normal user with normal hardware will experience broken audio with dolphin unless the old audio code or a new asynchronous audio mode is brought back. (Or you can wait 10 Years until normal hardware is powerful enough to run the new HLE audio code properly).
 
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Danny

Programmer | Moderator
Is this problem common knowledge? If not, I would consider opening a bug report at the dolphin bug tracker
 

V1del

New member
Yes it is and iirc etking got banned on the dolphin forums for constantly bugging the devs for this change and I doubt you will find any better answer here than on the dolphin forums... To summarize again:

- No it won't come back, it was broken and buggy code, the emulator got more accurate and hence the requirements rised a little.

Unfortunately, the current 4.0 version of Dolphin runs much slower than the old 3.0 builds on any normal piece of hardware. Even if you spend thousands of dollars and heavily overclock your CPU, you will not be able to play games smoothly and with lag free audio anymore.

With the old 3.0-750 build however, everything, even games like Zelda SS run smoothly and fine using the old asynchronous HLE audio mode which got removed from dolphin recently.

Yeah but instead the sound is broken everywhere, random loops and repeats in the majority of games... And you don't have to heavily overclock your CPU to get good performance it obviously helps for the more demanding games, most others run just fine... but yeah, as the software evolves and becomes more faithful to actual hardware the demands will rise, deal with it and get a new CPU, it will not only benefit you in dolphin you know? (also, running smoothly is simply wrong, your running at slower fps than fullspeed, just the sound keeps jugging along as normal...)

Thus, since the Dolphin 4.0 release, people start complaining about performance and asking for old releases everywhere. This is because almost nobody in the the world can afford the hardware or has the overclocing skills required to run the new HLE audio engine introduced with 4.0 properly.

From what I've seen it was just you that was complaining, constantly and multiple times and in topics totally unrelated, but it was always the same one dude...

But it would be really easy to fix this by bringing back the old audio code from 3.0-750 as an option for the average normal player like me. Are there any plans to fix this or to create a "old HLE audio" fork of Dolphin so that mobile users and users with normal hardware can use Dolphin again which currently is completely broken because of the non working audio?

For the love of god, if you are not a developer NEVER (EVER...EVER) talk "easy fix", because you have NO idea about anything (besides if it was, why haven't you forked yet and created your own branch, its an easy fix rite? oh wait...)

Define normal hardware? I have a perfectly normal i7 with 3.4 GHz clock and most games I've tried run just fine... Seriously, emulation is demanding on resources, why shouldn't they make use of new technology to make emulation more accurate?

Dolphin should be aimed at the normal user again, because this is how it became famous and successful long ago. At the moment any normal user with normal hardware will experience broken audio with dolphin unless the old audio code or a new asynchronous audio mode is brought back. (Or you can wait 10 Years until normal hardware is powerful enough to run the new HLE audio code properly).

see above, and yeah HLE audio runs absolutely smooth here, contrary to the 3.x releases which had sound bugs all over the place, so obviously it already runs good on current hardware.
 
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OP
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etking

New member
An easy to implement fix for the current performance problems would be to just include an (of course optional) option to use the faster old HLE audio code instead of the new (broken on older hardware) one and to allow to disable audio time stretch. This could also be forked by reverting most audio related changes since 3.0-750, especially all new-ax-hle related Git merges.

This quick and easy fix could allow thousands of users to enjoy using dolphin with working audio again. However, a proper fix based on the new high quality HLE audio code would be more complicated and require a partial rewrite to include async audio which is not supposed to happen anytime soon.

But a simple and quick fix to bring back the old performance would be really easy to do, but Dolphin developers do not seem to care. If anybody experiences heavy performance problems with 4.0, I'd suggest to try 3.0-750 with the old HLE audio code before giving a judgment. It is just the new HLE audio causing those heavy performance problems, rendering almost all GC and Wii games unplayable on normal real world hardware.

https://dolphin-emu.org/download/dev/08a9c660371202cfd8976ee60191a6f42445c1a9/?nocr=true
 
F

Fanatic 64

Guest
If it's so easy why don't you just grab the source and do it yourself? And I mean it seriously, you would supposedly help a lot of people without having to downgrade to a version with a lot of graphic and CPU emulation regressions.
 

V1del

New member
An easy to implement fix for the current performance problems would be to just include an (of course optional) option to use the faster old HLE audio code instead of the new (broken on older hardware) one and to allow to disable audio time stretch. This could also be forked by reverting most audio related changes since 3.0-750, especially all new-ax-hle related Git merges.

Again, I'm not familiar with Dolphin's codebase, so I can only speak of my own experiences: At work I work on infinitely less complex programs than Dolphin but even there, occasionally we'll have to rewrite things as new demands and challenges pour in for a specific program. It can simply happen that code written a few years ago isn't up to the new demands you'll have to rewrite it. Usually mostly with benefits, but there can be occasions where a feature will simply not be usable anymore with the changes made to the core system (READ: it can't be made optional anymore). I'm pretty damn sure something similar happened to dolphin, and they have much more code scattered throughout the emulator that requires the new HLE implementation and it'd be incredibly hackish to have any kind of support for the new features that get implemented in the old codebase.

Again, never assume something is easy, unless you do it yourself. it would have been done already if it was apparently so easy or you'd find more people willing to maintain the new base with the old HLE, but alas no one does it because its probably way harder than you imagine.

include async audio which is not supposed to happen anytime soon.

And this is entirely your fault...

delroth said:
For more fun, I was actually considering writing code for async HLE a few days ago as my last Dolphin-related project (started discussing it with people, etc.). You managed to completely kill my motivation to do that. Now I'm happy to not work on async HLE just to piss off people like you. Have fun.

Btw just to check, i've literally googled "Dolphin AX-HLE slow/sucks" and "Dolphin 4.0 slow" and on the first two pages of google results there where like 4 dudes or so, who all resigned to dolphin having moved forward and either buying a new rig or simply keep using 3.5, so i call bs on your THOUSANDS of people

And your 2.2GHz processor is not normal hardware for gamecube/wii emulation as simple as that
 
Which game is giving you problems etking? A majority of GameCube games seem to run fine for me on stock settings on my Haswell build and integrated Intel graphics.
 

revl8er

That Damn Good
I have no issues on my system except in games like Xenoblade (which has a little slowdown) and The Last Story which is one of the most demanding games. Every other game I threw at it works full speed no problems. As said before, since accuracy is what the developers are going for it's going to require a much more powerful system to get full speed all around. It's pretty much the same with other emulators also such as Higan. If you want to use an older version to get the speed you want then use it. Most games will work on 3.0. If you want to use the newer versions then upgrade your system.
 
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etking

New member
Which games I have problems with?

All, except for a small number of Gamecube games that always run on full speed. Wind Waker seems to run fine with the new Dolphin, Zelda TP has massive time stretch issues with the audio running in slow motion or at double speed all the time.

All Wii games don't output sound anymore, they just output random garbage instead. I used to contribute a lot of bug reports to the Dolphin issue tracker but I had to stop because Dolphin does not run on my PC anymore.

The new HLE audio code offers a great quality improvement, it is just the little detail of missing async audio that makes Dolphin complete unusable for me. Therefore I stopped using Dolphin and started to join the pcsx2 community.

The official dolphin forums are full of people having performance issues and most people asking critical questions get banned arbitrarily.

I don't have much time to play games anyway, but the audio change is a slap in face of all the people that made Dolphin great and popular because most of them cannot use it anymore due to incompatible hardware.

And there would be no need for that, the tiny addition of async audio without timestrech would fix 90% of todays audio performance issues for everyone without any negative effects.

Before the change nearly all games, including Zelda SS, Xenoblade and Mariokart Wii were perfectly playable from start to finish. With older Dolphin revisions, I can even play Mario Galaxy at 3xIR, I collected 30 Stars so far. New Dolphin revisions have broken and completely garbled audio in every Wii game, and heavily timestretch-distorted audio in most Gamecube games.

Thousands of other regular users are also effected, but they often have no technicial understanding and stop trying to use Dolphin. They all could be happy users with just some small changes.

Dolphin 3.0-750 is the best and most stable revision for everyone to try the old code and prove me wrong.
 
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F

Fanatic 64

Guest
You know there's no point in arguing here since the Dolphin developers don't read this forum, right?
 

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